Welcome to LiveJournal news. If you crave more frequent and detailed news, check out the following journals:

news	Infrequent, basic, overall news. (this page)
lj_maintenance	Server status and planned downtime announcements.
lj_dev	LiveJournal technical development & planning.
changelog	Every little change, as it happens.
lj_test	The testing community, for testing the above changes.
lj_biz	LiveJournal business-related community.

What we're up to!

Monday, Jul 21st, 2003 -- 8:32 pm

denisep

Lots of great stuff going on over the past few weeks; here's some of the highlights. First, LiveJournal has recently hired xevinx, a web designer who'll be working on providing new and interesting journal layouts for the S2 style system. His first design, "Component", is a S2 style available to paid users. Check out the preview. If you'd like to use it on your journal: go to /customize/, choose S2 for your style system if you haven't already, and select "Component" for your layout. It's highly customizable, so play with all of the advanced color/component options. Thanks to all of the testers in lj_test for helping to test it! We'd also like to welcome evan aboard. Evan's been helping out with LJ nearly since the beginning, but this summer he's back to being a full-time employee. Evan's summer is going to be spent doing lots of different things for the site, including working as the "interface" between employees and volunteer developers. Some users have been asking about community searching. Temporarily, community results will not be shown when you do an interest search. We had to disable it because it was too database-intensive. (Geek explanation: The query was unindexed, and it was killing the rest of the site.) It'll be back as quickly as possible. A few other things about communities have changed lately, too. First, users can't be added to communities without their consent anymore. When someone tries to add you to a community, you'll get an email asking for your permission to add you. And, a feature that's been long-awaited: community maintainers can now edit the community memories from the maintainer account, rather than having to log in as the community. Just pick the community from the "Work as user" menu at the top of the Add Memories page. Server-wise, we're moving users from cluster to cluster, and have been for the past week or so. This is because we've got some new hardware, and we're upgrading some of the old hardware. If you see "Journal is read-only" for a few minutes, you're likely being moved. Wait a few minutes and you'll be able to post or comment again. If some of you notice that you're on different clusters, that's why. For those of you who don't already watch it, lj_maintenance is the place to go for those burning questions like "why isn't LJ working?" We've been doing a lot of work lately, both planned and unplanned, to improve LiveJournal's back-end. For those of you who are interested in that sort of thing, Brad wrote two posts about our backend, and how we're improving it. In an effort to keep speeding up the site, we're adding more and more things to memcache; it's making things get better and better. For those of you who are interested in helping to test new changes before they are applied to the site, we can always use more people helping out in lj_test. And finally, for those of you who have some spare time and want to make a difference with your journals, check out Blogathon. It's a way to earn money for charity by updating your LiveJournal or outside journal every half an hour over 24 hours. It starts on July 26, at 6AM Pacific Time. We're not affiliated with them; we just think it's pretty neat. (191 Comments | Comment on this)

Test server

Friday, Jun 6th, 2003 -- 4:48 pm

bradfitz

One of the most vocal complaints we've been hearing lately is that there's no public test server to let the community test out new code before it goes live. Although we do internal testing, having thousands of testers is arguably better than just 10. So, to address this, we've revived our public test server and made a new community (lj_test) to focus on announcing new code changes. That way anybody willing to test will know what areas to pound on the hardest, looking for bugs. Comments being disabled here, but you can go reply/ask questions at the lj_test announcement.

A casual stroll through LiveJournal's backend...

Wednesday, May 28th, 2003 -- 11:56 pm

bradfitz

I wrote up a big post about the current state of LiveJournal's server situation and architecture here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_maintenance/60984.html I'm leaving comments off here, but you can go comment at the URL above.

Weblogs.com

Thursday, Apr 17th, 2003 -- 1:37 pm

bradfitz

We've added optional support to ping Weblogs.com when your journal updates. (public entries only) This is a paid-user feature. To enable it, go to: http://www.livejournal.com/editinfo.bml Be aware that Weblogs.com doesn't update instantly. (The Weblogs.com equivalent for all LiveJournal users is the latest entries page) (117 Comments | Comment on this)

Millionth Account

Sunday, Apr 13th, 2003 -- 12:03 am

jproulx

Last night at exactly 21:17:38 Pacific time, the millionth LiveJournal account was created. To honor the occasion, the user renamed their account to 1000000. Welcome to another LiveJournal landmark ladies and gentlemen! (156 Comments | Comment on this)